Thank the little baby Jesus! I was afraid that my ability to enjoy a Star Wars novel was completely dashed upon the rocks when I read Children of the Jedi. I’m not going to lie. I had to read two random books just to get the damned taste out of my mouth. Luckily Darksaber is in another league altogether. I think Kevin Anderson just grasps the sort of narrative flow of the expanded universe better than Barbara Hambly. The characters and the flow seem to mesh better than in Children of the Jedi, despite the fact that he’s working with mostly the same characters. Callista is still a black hole for me, but that’s mostly personal preference. I feel like Anderson just wanted to write her off entirely but seeing how she pops up again in Planet of Twilight, again written by Hambly. I’ll assume that Hambly liked Callista more than I do.

Darksaber at first seemed poised to turn me off once again, as the “build another Death Star” plot point was not at all enticing. But the side-plots involving the return of Admiral Daala and her attempts to unify the Imperial fleet, which seemed like the logical course of action following the events of the last few books, was quite well written and probably the most engaging element of the book. I really didn’t care one lick about Callista and only truly warmed to the Durga the Hutt/Darksaber plotline about midway through the course of the novel.

I am going to state here and now that I have no intention of reading Planet of Twilight, as I don’t care about Callista and barely made it through Children of the Jedi so I’m going to call that one a bye-week and move on to the final installment of the X-Wing series instead. It’s my blog. I can do what I want dammit.